Selig, League to Review Schott Interview

Acting baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said he and National League President Leonard Coleman will review the ESPN tape on which owner Marge Schott of the Cincinnati Reds praised the start of Adolf Hitler’s term as German chancellor.

Selig said he was inundated by calls from Jewish groups and others protesting Schott’s remarks but refused to predict whether baseball would take disciplinary action.

“We have to follow due process,” he said.

On Feb. 2, 1993, baseball’s executive council suspended Schott for a year and fined her $25,000 for bringing “disrepute and embarrassment” to baseball with her repeated use of racial and ethnic slurs.

She was also ordered to undergo counseling, but in the interview shown by ESPN Sunday night, she repeated many of her 1993 remarks, saying of Hitler, “Everything you read, when he came in he was good. . . . Everybody knows he was good at the beginning but he just went too far.”

Ken Jacobson, assistant national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said, “What everybody knows, but apparently not Mrs. Schott,” is that Hitler laid out his course for domination of the world and extinction of the Jews in “Mein Kampf,” nine years before becoming chancellor.

Phil Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, called Schott a “crude and thoughtless woman who has now reached a new low.”